Dear Riot: Malzahar. Sincerely, Old malzahar main
I made several long posts before Malzahar received his changes, or was "gutted" as I prefer to describe the event. I won't try to explain why the changes had such a drastic effect, and I won't complain about how unnecessary the changes were. I'll reitterate one point: When malzahar was reworked on the mage update, his kit was given interactions that made him good and made him a champion that required knowledge/skill to reach his full potential. With his last nerfs/changes to his voidlings and how they interact, he may as well have been reverted to pre-mage rework malzahar. And now, he's better as a support than a mid laner, because he's once again nothing more than an ult-bot.
I'll just come out and say it: Malzahar will only be good again if you return his voidlings to the sameway they were before. Buffs don't have much of a chance in creating balance when there's a seriously low skill requirement to play the champion.
Why do I think I know so much? I understood things about Malzahar that even professional mid laners clearly didn't understand, after watching them play him. I was playing him a month before any pro started playing him, and even though I haven't played him since the nerfs, he's still somehow my highest mastery champion. And it's not like I'm a gold or platinum scrub. I sat around diamond 1 for about half of the summer and then went back to focusing on school. Dyrus himself couldn't understand how I was managing to win when he had a superior matchup (Dyrus, if you're reading this, you're still my #1 favorite streamer <3). When malzahar's voidlings get target focused with nerfs by the balance team, there was no longer anything to be good at. Voidling management was dead after those changes. If you were good at managing voidlings, then you were an above average malzahar player, and it wasn't an easy thing to do.
If you didn't know how to do voidling management, then you were pretty much playing ahri without being able to competently land a charm. Buffing malzahar wouldn't do anything, because he's no longer a champion requiring skill to play. You press his buttons, and you win or lose depending on how good the numbers are.
This is why Ryze was a problem for such a long time. Ryze only became capable of being balanced when his Q became a skill shot. If you want to see Malzahar make a non-toxic comeback, then the only answer is to revert the previous changes to his void-lings.
The rest of this post is for people who may have felt that Malzahar was previously toxic and my explanations on how he wasn't and what his counterplay would be.
1).First off is an explanation of what it means to be overpowered (at least what my understanding of the word is). Overpowered means that there is a serious lack of counterplay. It means that I can pick a champion completely blind of the enemy team and be confident that more than half of the time, they won't be able to do anything to stop me or counter me. To have strengths or superior match-ups does not make a champion overpowered. Similar to how you can't complain if you pick syndra into zilean or taliyah into katarina, you can't complain that Malzahar has superior matchups.
2). Malzahar does not dominate all matchups. As I mentioned before, the key to malzahar's damage WAS, I repeat WAS, knowing how to manage voidlings properly. If you're playing a champion that has a spell that can fairly easy clear the first voidling before it can multiply, then Malzahar's not really going to be able to do much to you on his own. If you're not playing something that can do that, then it's not like you lost the game. Granted, you're going to have to be carful with how close you get to him if you let him stack up 5 voidlings without contest (Kind of like if you let tryndamere or renekton build up their rage bar for free). Sometimes you just have to play safe in lane matchups, but an overpowered champion means playing safe isn't even an option. If Malzahar ults you with no voidlings up and uses his full combo, you don't need to worry about dying, even if you're a squishy mid lane mage).
3). Malahar has counters that make the game difficult for him. As a malzahar main, my favorite counter to it was taliyah and second favorite zilean. Zilean's slow and Taliyah's ult can both take advantage of Malzahar not having any mobility. Zilean's ult is a no brainer for why he's my second favorite. Taliyah can take a step further. She has a spell that can deal significant damage while procing his spell shield, she can clear voidlings even if they're allowed to multiply, and if you're good at landing W well let's just say it comes up a lot faster than flash and he has no other mobility.
I could delve into matchups for hours, but that'd get really stale really fast if it hasn't already. And although I used taliyah and zilean as examples, there are plenty more champions that you can play into malzahar. A decent number of them, though not all, might be skill matchups, but skill matchups are a good thing to have more of.
